Day 30: 30 baseball books in 30 days of April
The book: "Baseball's Greatest Hit: The Story of 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game' "
The author: Thompson Robert, Tim Wiles and Andy Strasberg
How to find it: Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation, 222 pages, $29.95.
Where we'd go looking for it: We recommend, for this and anything else, Powell's online.
The scoop: Our most favorite version of the song, and one we've saved on TiVo until the machine finally busts, is what Harpo Marx did on his harp during a 1955 episode of "I Love Lucy." Yes, it seems pretty random, but if that could be and played at my funeral, I'd die a happy baseball fan.
The one you and your kids sing at the ballgame has its own charm as well, and there are many other versions to be found. And the authors have done so.
"Take Me Out To the Ballgame", celebrating its 100th anniversary, is more than just the third-most popular song of all time (behind "Happy Birthday" and "The Star Spangeled Banner." It needed a book about its history, and now we've got it. One hundred years later.
Plenty of surprising tidbits are through the book. Such as: It became a hit long before it was sung at baseball games. Composer Albert von Tizler and lyricist Jack Norworth wrote "Take Me Out'' to be sung during reel changes in movie theaters to promote sales of the sheet music.
"Americans were getting together and singing `Take Me Out to the Ball Game' in movie theaters decades before they did it in ballparks,'' Thompson, associate dean of the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College, told the Associated Press in a recent interview.
According to the authors, it has been included in 1,200 moves and TV shows. But it wasn't until Harry Caray started to bellow it out at Comiskey Park in Chicago during White Sox games in the mid-'70s that it became more of a louder tradition. He took it with him to Wrigley Field when he became the Cubs broadcaster in 1981, and when the WGN cameras could focus on him every seventh-inning stretch, the song was rejuvinated. It was Caray, the authors decide, who made it a regular song at that particular time. And it continues to be a Nancy Bea Hefley organ-played tradition at Dodger Stadium.
The book has a list of every recording it could find of the song, including on piano rolls, toy musical chips, vinyl records, laser discs ... even the 1994 Ken Burns "Baseball" documentary, where it was played in many versions (and reportedly sung, in part, by Bob Costas). Some are as short as 20-some seconds, others go past the five-minute mark. More intuitive to the book is a CD that has nine versions of the recording -- with the shortest at 1 minute, 36 seconds.
And a point of local note: Tilzer died in L.A. at age 78 in 1956; Norworth, who was honored on the 50th anniversary of the song before a Dodgers' game at the Coliseum in 1958, died a year later in Laguna Beach at age 79.
How it goes down in the scorebook: Here's to another 100 years, and the version we hope never goes away:
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